A couple oldtimers awhile back recalled when “the seineyards were a resort spot of sorts” and not just a place at the mouth of the Ochlockonee River where in a four-month season ending in December a man engaged in “good, hard, honest work” could earn $15 to $25 a month. That was considered “good pay at the time” from harvesting mullet that, year after year, topped 100,000 lbs.
The Ochlockonee River southwest of the Florida capital of Tallahassee carves its way through the Apalachicola National Forest across south Wakulla County before it empties into its namesake bay that surrounds the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge. Its 206-mile freshwater outflow maintains the aquatic balance for thriving oyster and clam growth.
It’s also one of multiple paddling trails among a growing system of 450 trail miles that Wakulla’s destination marketing organization promotes top-of-the-list to hikers and cyclists.
For the Deep South, Wakulla is all about Travel to the Deep Nearby
Geographically, we’re talking about Florida just 29.1 miles southwest of Tallahassee in a section where the roughly 400-mile peninsula that starts in Key West gives way to the Big Bend and Florida’s 11 western counties of the Panhandle.
In Florida, where young people historically have fled rural counties because jobs were few apart from farming, south Wakulla is a place that many people come back to or never leave at all. They mix easily with newcomers long settled in, who remain passionate about conserving natural Florida, and who for decades have figured out how to earn good livelihoods by observing conservation as well as economic bottom lines.
The place feels like a family reunion where those already at home welcome back all those long ago forgotten or who otherwise relate by shared values even if some cussed uncles would just as soon turn south Wakulla into more commuter sprawl like the north county already is.
It helps that Florida’s only Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology, a campus of Tallahassee Community College, trains entrepreneurs in sustainable aquaculture and “green guides” who interpret their kind of tourism as climate action across 737 square miles of lands, most in public ownership; two of its heritage towns, and one of Florida’s few roadside attractions that with its dependence on clean water keeps growing, not fading.
Worm grunting, Panacea and Sopchoppy
You need to book your guide early for Wakulla’s premier visitor event that comes up every second Saturday of April. That’s Sopchoppy’s one-of-a-kind Worm Gruntin’ Festival that’s all about “grunting up” earthworms according to a folk tradition made famous 51 years ago by Charles Kuralt in his CBS TV show, On the Road. Kuralt revealed another way for locals to engage in “good, hard, honest work” whose squiggly production still draws premium prices after packaged and shipped to live bait shops across surrounding states.
West to east, Wakulla calls its four coastal towns Sopchoppy, its own city since 1905 with 500 people, Panacea (unincorporated) with 1,150 people, Spring Creek (unincorporated with maybe 100), and St. Marks, its own city since 1833 (maybe 300).
One of four top Panacea restaurants, The Seineyard Rock Landing, displays memorial narratives to generations of the Stokley family telling about the “folks in covered wagons” coming from Georgia, mostly Cairo and Thomasville, to spend a week at the seineyard.
These days folks drive down in their RVs from Atlanta to a half-dozen campgrounds or park themselves at everything from the refurbished mid-century Panacea Motel or book entire houses or condo rentals. That’s mostly at Alligator Point below the Ochlockonee surrounded by beaches on three sides into neighboring Franklin County.
Gulf Marine Specimen Laboratories
The heart of Panacea is the Gulf Marine Specimen Laboratories, opened almost 60 years ago by one of Florida’s larger-than-life transplants. That’s Jack Rudloe, now 80, who with his late wife Anne ingeniously turned their business of collecting sea creatures for scientific research into a roadside attraction. Today the site on Dickerson Bay alongside US 98 through downtown draws some 30,000 paying visitors a year who come for dipping their hands into touch tanks and support the lab’s rehabilitation of injured wildlife, especially rare turtles.
Jack settled in after his mother, a New York City RN, realized Jack wasn’t learning anything from city schools, relocated to Franklin County and later to Panacea. Jack was 15, hung around the water, got to know the fishermen and decided to make a living from the sea.
“It’s kind of amazing how prominent the place has become,” Jack tells me, from the lab’s start in a relocated barracks from an Army base that he acquired after fast-talking his way onto a collecting expedition from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to Madagascar when he’d just turned 20. The campus now covers 3 acres with an education center named for Anne and operates on an annual budget of $600,000 to $700,000 mainly covered by specimen sales, some 800 field trips a year, admissions to the aquariums, from the gift shop and partially by an AmeriCorps grant and from royalties on the more than a dozen books that Jack and Anne have written.
New and instantly popular is the “Picklearium” that shows dozens of deep sea specimen pickled in formaldehyde in jars for viewing. “Every aquarium needs one,” Jack insists.
Jack and Anne’s son Cypress now looks after day-to-day operations, while Jack continues to fight a board of county commissioners who, among 4 of the 5, are filling wetlands for housing and who fought a regional sewer system that’s at last coming and will improve bay water quality. Jack’s environmental battles have included limits on the taking of horseshoe crabs and gaining acceptance for turtle excluder devices.
“I was able to weaponize my arguments on major TV shows including Today because of all the books that Anne and I wrote.” Next up is The Panacea Prophecy that tells about how intense foot dragging intrigued to trash Wakulla’s natural coast.
Just below the campus and separated only by a marina are 2 of the most popular area restaurants, Trident and the Seineyard Rock Landing that tells the region’s history, as does the nonprofit Big Bend Maritime Center that teaches classes in boatbuilding, restorations and runs camps to the north. Close by is a Wakulla Welcome Center and a mile north the affordable, utterly casual, Posey’s Up the Creek Steam Room & Oyster Bar. At the Highway 98 Bridge that crosses the Ochlockonee is Angelo’s Seafood Restaurant, since 1945 with the most beautiful views and a tad dressy,
NOTES
https://www.fws.gov/refuge/st-marks
https://www.thepanaceamotel.com/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/re-opening-a-can-of-worms/
https://www.rentbyowner.com/property/buckhorn-creek-lodge-nature-on-the-river/AB-1381930
https://gulfspecimen.org/ and talks with Jack
http://bigbendmaritimecenter.com/
https://www.naturalnorthflorida.com/things-to-do/wakulla-welcome-center/
